The kicker is that all he has created with engines not only improves the environment but he has done it with OFF-THE-SHELF-PARTS. This American Wizard has a plan to get us off the Saudi Teat by converting one third of passenger cars to diesel. From diesel we can then follow up to bio-fuels by passing the current stalemate of nobody wants to buy cars that do not have refuel stations as accessible as fast food joints. DOT says that if only one third of light trucks and passenger cars were converted to diesel we'd reduce our oil consumption by 1.4 million barrels of oil per day--which is the current amount we import from, our friends, the Saudi's. Less Cash. Fewer Orcs. The financing of the Orc Wars starts with us.
"Johnathan's in a league of his own," says Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables, the nation's largest producer of biodiesel. "Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is."Nobody--particularly not Detroit. Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides. This fall, labor unrest is brewing, and after decades of inertia on fuel-economy standards, Congress is jockeying to boost the target for cars to 35 mpg, a 10 mpg jump (which is either ridiculously large or ridiculously small, depending on whom you ask). More than a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, gas prices have hovered around $3 per gallon for more than a year. And European and Japanese carmakers are flooding the market with diesel and hybrid machines that get up to 40% better mileage than the best American cars; some, such as Mercedes's new BlueTec diesel sedans, deliver that kind of efficiency and more horsepower.
General Motors ,Ford , andChrysler , in short, have a choice: Cede still more ground--or mount a technological counterattack.Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."
